To ignite a global conversation about the definition of beauty, Dove
launched Dove Real Beauty Sketches, a three-minute YouTube film about how
women view themselves. Moving and poignant, the video received 163 million
global views, topped our Cannes YouTube Ads Leaderboard and won the
Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of
Creativity. Read about how a combination of great content, YouTube Brand
Channels and YouTube and Google ads led to this beautiful success.

The Goals

Build brand love and loyalty

Turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety, for women

The Approach

Produced a three minute video, Dove Real Beauty Sketches, which
was uploaded in 25 languages to 46 Dove YouTube channels

Dove believes in celebrating beauty in its diversity and, in doing so,
raising the self-esteem of women and young girls globally. Featuring real
women in advertising has been an integral part of the Dove brand’s DNA—dating
back to the introduction of the Dove Beauty Bar in 1957.

Dove launched the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 based on the findings of a
major global study, The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report. The brand
ignited a global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty
after the study proved the hypothesis that the definition of beauty had
become limiting and unattainable. In 2006, when Spain banned overly thin
models from its runways, Dove responded on YouTube with a compelling short
film, Evolution, depicting the transformation of a real woman into a
model and promoting awareness of how unrealistic perceptions of beauty are
created.

The way women see themselves is dramatically different from how others
perceive them. Only 4% of women globally consider themselves beautiful and
54% agree that when it comes to how they look, they are their own worst
beauty critic. In 2013, Dove conducted a compelling social experiment to
bring this to life. Documented in a short film, Dove Real Beauty
Sketches explores how women view their own beauty in contrast to what
others see.

The film, created by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, features an FBI-trained
sketch artist drawing a woman’s portrait according to her own
self-description. He then sketches a portrait of the same woman according to
a stranger’s description of her. Throughout, the artist never lays eyes on
the women themselves, and neither the artist nor women know about the social
experiment.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches struck an emotional chord with millions of women
who recognize that when it comes to how they look, the biggest beauty
pressure is the pressure they put on themselves. Aggregating views across
YouTube and other platforms, the film quickly became the most viewed online
video ad of all time, according to Unilever, with over 163 million global
views. It is also, according to Unruly Media, the most shared video ad in
over a year with over four million shares across a variety of platforms, and
the third most shared film of all time.

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Spreading the Message through YouTube and Google

The original brief from Dove did not specify the type of media to be used,
but Ogilvy, PHD and Unilever collectively agreed that YouTube would be the
most effective platform to launch the three-minute film. YouTube provided an
authentic way for viewers to engage in and share the experience. Fernando
Machado, Global VP Dove Skin said, “We knew that we had something magical
with Dove Real Beauty Sketches and felt that strategically it would reach the
most scale on YouTube and online. The moment that the film was uploaded to
the Dove YouTube channel, it quickly started to gain traction around the
world with men, women, media and even other brands sharing the film.”

Dove Real Beauty Sketches launched in four key markets, U.S., Canada, Brazil
and Australia and was then rolled out across additional countries. The film
was uploaded in 25 languages to 46 Dove YouTube channels and quickly amassed
global reach and buzz. Dove supported this in the following ways:

Increased global investment in TrueView in-stream.
TrueView allows users to choose whether or not to watch the video, so Dove
knew they were reaching an engaged audience and saw paid views drive earned
views. Dove also saw eight million follow-on views from TrueView alone.

Added a YouTube homepage masthead in the US, in
partnership with Mindshare, giving Dove 100% share of voice for a day on
YouTube.com.

Anticipated search lift and made sure they captured interested audiences
actively looking for them. They added Search and TrueView
in-search, gathering hand-raisers from both Google.com and
YouTube.com.

YouTube and Google also provided Dove with a platform to encourage
participation from their audience, many of whom were moved by the video.

The Dove YouTube brand channels allowed users to engage
in follow-on activity, such as subscribing to the channel and exploring more
content. For Dove Real Beauty Sketches alone, Dove has six videos and over 15
minutes of content, including a six minute version of the film that has three
million views.

Dove also organized a follow-up Google+
Hangout on Mother’s Day in Canada, where three moms and their
daughters were interviewed by the same forensic sketch artist through
Hangouts. The Hangout footage was used in a separate TrueView ad campaign,
and a Google+ badge added to Dove’s U.S. and Canadian sites
helped Dove reach over 275,000 followers on Google+.

Dove has even seen user-generated video responses on
YouTube. For instance, meganheartsmakeup, who has nearly 650,000 subscribers,
produced a response to the film that has over 56,000 views.

Campaign Reaches Billions Around the World

The film has garnered widespread attention across all media channels and the
brand has been overwhelmed by the positive response from around the world.
The phenomenon has been further fueled by celebrities and other brands
joining the conversation and sharing the film with others. Additionally, 15
video parodies of the film have been created. To date, the campaign has
generated 4.6 billion PR and blogger media impressions, which continue to
increase daily. Dove has also seen a surge of engagement and conversation
across the brand’s social channels. There have been over one million ‘likes’
on the Dove Facebook page and the film has reached a staggering one out of
ten Facebook users.

With YouTube comments such as “this made me cry” and “I showed this to my
high school students the other day. It made a real impact on them,” there is
no denying that Dove has made a difference in women’s lives with Dove Real
Beauty Sketches. To Fernando, the ad has achieved its goal of building brand
love. “If Dove Real Beauty Sketches has inspired women to see the beauty in
themselves that others do, we consider the campaign a success,” he said.

With compelling creative and an effective media strategy, it’s no wonder that
Dove Real Beauty Sketches was the audience’s and critics’ choice of the year,
ranking at the #1 spot on the Cannes YouTube Ads
Leaderboard, based on paid and organic views of all ads uploaded between
March 2012 and April 2013, and winning the Titanium Grand Prix, the highest
honor at the 2013 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

"We knew that we had something magical with Dove Real Beauty Sketches and felt
that strategically it would reach the most scale on YouTube and online."